Wesley Clark Calls for Internment Camps for “Radicalized” Americans

GulagBoundThis is a horrific idea.Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for hunting down and dispatching terrorists
and bad guys on our turf. But internment camps? Let’s just stop for a
minute and wonder why Wesley Clark
has done an about face so suddenly. Anything they can use in the name
of national defense like internment camps can also be used against
everyday Americans at their discretion. The internment camps in WWII
were shameful and wrong. The same would be true here. If you have to
deport people or prosecute them, that is one thing. But to round up
everyone you deem ‘radicalized’ is quite another. What does that even
mean to Clark? Color me highly suspicious of this and shocked that it is
being floated out there.

Retired general and former Democratic presidential
candidate Wesley Clark on Friday called for World War II-style
internment camps to be revived for “disloyal Americans.” In an interview
with MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts in the wake of the mass shooting in
Chatanooga, Tennessee, Clark said that during World War II, “if someone
supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t
say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were
prisoners of war.”He called for a revival of internment camps to help combat Muslim
extremism, saying, “If these people are radicalized and they don’t
support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a
matter of principle, fine. It’s their right and it’s our right and
obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration
of the conflict.”The comments were shockingly out of character for Clark, who after
serving as supreme allied commander of NATO made a name for himself in
progressive political circles. In 2004, his campaign for the Democratic
presidential nomination was highly critical of the Bush administration’s
excessive response to the 9/11 terror attacks. Since then, he has been a
critic of policies that violate the Geneva Convention, saying in 2006 that policies such as torture violate “the very values that [we] espouse.”In a memoir
written the following year, he also famously alleged that the White
House under Bush had developed a massively imperialistic plan for the
Middle East, which would see the administration attempt to “take out
seven countries in five years,” beginning with the invasions in Iraq and
Afghanistan.Earlier this year I spoke with Clark at the annual Lewis and Clark
University Symposium on International Affairs in Portland, Oregon. The
subject of our discussion was how to deal with the potential threat of
foreign fighters returning from armed conflicts abroad. At the time,
Clark spoke out strongly against “the politics of fear” and eroding
democratic institutions and norms, while reiterating his criticism of
the excesses committed by Bush-era neoconservatives under the banner of
fighting terrorism.But on Friday, he was advocating the revival of a policy widely
considered to be among the most shameful chapters in American history:
World War II domestic internment camps. Aside from the inherent problems
in criminalizing people for their beliefs, Clark’s proposal (which his
MSNBC interlocutor did not challenge him on) also appears to be based on
the concept of targeting people for government scrutiny who are not
even “radicalized,” but who the government decides may be subject to
radicalization in the future. That radicalization itself is a highly amorphous and politically malleable concept only makes this proposal more troubling.“We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be
radicalized. We’ve got to cut this off at the beginning,” Clark said. “I
do think on a national policy level we need to look at what
self-radicalization means because we are at war with this group of
terrorists.” And he added that “not only the United States but our
allied nations like Britain, Germany and France are going to have to
look at their domestic law procedures.”Despite an outcry about his comments on social media, Clark has not
responded publicly. As of Monday morning, his latest tweet was from
Friday, encouraging his followers to watch his interview.

Wesley Clark is a political hack. His suggestion here should chill
every American right to the bone. He’s not just suggesting it for
America either… he’s suggesting it be done globally. Listen to the video closely. He’s suggesting people who are likely
to be radicalized should be imprisoned. This is unconstitutional and
barbaric. He’s suggesting here that we suspend the Constitution (even
more than they already have) and build and populate gulags. I
can’t believe what I’m hearing and seeing. Things are hurtling out of
control in America. Americans better stand up and stop this or we are
going to see a fascist tyranny take hold here and fast. Internment camps? What scares me the most is that people on both sides of the political sphere are cheering this on. Unfreaking believable.